Continue Testing
by Let's Continue Testing
Summary: Years after the events of Portal 2, a new face in the role of Blue tests alone, until she realises there's more to life than puzzles and solitary testing. With her new companion taking on the role of Orange, will they be able to uncover their pasts, reasons to be, and survive their adventures in Aperture? Based off the Perpetual and Co-Operative Testing Initiatives.
1. Chapter 1: Recycled Air

_Authors Note: Hello! This is my little alternate universe fanfiction drabble that spiralled out of control and is now getting quite long. It centres primarily around two original characters taking on a co-operative testing role, with their own stories entirely separated from the original Portal/Portal2 canon, but with cameos from some familiar faces and voices, all set in the very familiar Aperture Laboratories._

_It has previously been available on its tumblrblog, _lets-continue-testing_, and I thought it might be nice to share it here as well. It can be followed there, and there's more information as well as some other related material. I promise to keep my authors notes to the bare minimum, but I will admit in this introduction that the first few chapters are a little bit slow, as I had never intended to get so wrapped up in the characters and story they had to tell. Every chapter has a musical title, because I'm overly fond of such things, but knowing or listening to the songs isn't pivotal to enjoyment of the story._

_Thank you very much for stopping by, and welcome to the story!_

* * *

-1-

track one

_Recycled Air The Postal Service_

I watch the patchwork farms' slow fade into the ocean's arms  
And from here they can't see me stare / Calm down, release your cares  
The stale taste of recycled air

* * *

Time was something of an abstract construct now-a-days. Or now-a-whenever, as it were, being that days had become too hard to keep track of somewhere long ago. She'd been informed as much, of course, how hours and weeks passed confusingly dragging themselves reluctantly through simulated unrelenting _daylight_ and synthetic vapours and a vague, distant memory of a sun that was warm and would set every now and then to give your eyes a rest.

As if in some sympathy for the concept, her third eye blinked slowly, scrapingly, giving every impression of lethargy despite the fact that it had never known sleep. It was just another one of those odd notions, falling by the wayside, seeming more archaic and more useless as time crawled ever on at whatever imperceptible and unmeasurable rate it chose in the halogen.

_Continue testing._

Cube, button, velocity, faith plate, thermal discouragement beam; that ever sought after golden glowing tick by the doorway, friendly, bright, the colour of-of-of- and the hiss of air as the huge metal drew away from a job well done.

Sometimes, if she played it right, she could stand by the doorway as it slid away. If she was really lucky, in that brief moment where two rooms collided and their atmospheres merged in the space where the door had been, she'd be caught in the draft, that brief rush of cool air on her cheeks and in her hair, and something that was almost, _nearly_, a decent parody of fresh.

_Continue testing._

She still liked the windows. They were few, and far between of course, and probably put there intentionally. Nothing was unintentional down here; everything neat and nicely controlled by _Her_ and an overgrown room couldn't have snuck through the cracks just because it was beyond the frosted glass. Could it?

It was a certain flight of fancy, but the areas looked so untamed and so wild and _true_ that a small, confused part of her liked to think of them as free. Then again, freedom was like sleep, another one of those archaic and useless terms that was starting to give way to leave more processing room for the puzzles, for buttons, for testing.

_"Do you like it?"_ came the voice, sudden and abrupt and all-enveloping, but not so unfamiliar that it required any physical response anymore. _[once she might have flinched]._ Her palm on the textured glass was relaying messages up to her central nervous system nicely as she stood patiently; rough, cool, that ever allusive and nagging sensation of something crisp_, fresh_, something _more_.

"_That one is called a 'tree'_. _Do you know what that is? Just in case you don't remember, it's the big, close-by one with all the leaves at the top_."

Something more. Did she remember? No, not quite, not quite a memory. Something lost a long, long time ago. But the tree was familiar none the less, with its long brown leg that would have taken several good steps to get all the way around, and its tiny moving parts at the top. _Leaves._

Yes, leaves. All three of her visual inputs moved to focus on the ground, the large blue one in the middle of her torso giving a small click of resistance as it rolled within its metal casing and viewed the cracked tiles at the base of the tree. Leaves. They fell off periodically, for some reason, and piled on the floor; brown and rotting and, somehow, just as she'd expected to see them.

_Continue testing._

This chamber was wrong. Echoingly, eerily, _wrong._

There was no foreseeable solution. She had tried everything. She had jumped, fallen, carried, flown right to the top on the velocity of a twenty foot drop and still no solution.

No matter what she tried, how she placed portals, threw cubes in vain at a second distant button or spent what seemed like quite long periods of that elusive concept of _time_ in stasis, consulting her problem solving applications for all she was worth, no answer had presented itself.

But there was something. A memory of the answer.

Something taller than herself, quick moving, feet side by side and four _four!_ of them, all _tff-tff-tff_ along grated catwalks. Another voice, a voice that wasn't _the_ Voice, full of theories and physics and problem solving together, and a laugh somewhere between a lilt and a synthesized skip as the clap of their hands meeting echoed along behind them, down the growing string of their successfully completed chambers.

Friendly, and bright; something the familiar colour of the Tick of Success.

And there was something more that she remembered now, standing here by the red switch she'd pushed hundreds of times in the hopes of finding a cube that would make it onto the distant floor button without her needing to manually take it there, as that was the resounding great problem of this chamber.

Red; searing and bright and _hot_, an echo of pain and the clatter of bullets. Fear, and agony, searing through whatever awful receptors controlled such a sensation. And worse still, a scream, somewhere between a lilt and a synthesized screech.

She backed slowly from the switch, staring at the unrelenting doorway on the other side of the room with its offending blue crosses, and longed for ticks the colour of eyes, eyes that were golden and friendly and bright before they were shattered and grey.

Vaguely aware of the Voice communicating with her, probably chastising, she let her legs sink from underneath her until she had slid down the wall of the small, high alcove, and tuned out of her external audio processors to listen instead to the sudden yell of realization that had been hidden inside, hidden somewhere down past the gasping respiratory system installed in her chest that dragged desperately at the dry, recycled air of the facility. Hidden somewhere behind the blue mechanical eye that whirled and blinked rapidly, panic-stricken with memory, with realization, conveying an emotion missing from her gritted jaw and frozen face.

Some chambers weren't supposed to be solved alone.


	2. Chapter 2: Science is Fun

-2-

track two

_Science is Fun Portal 2 OST_

_I will say, though, that since you went to all the trouble of  
__waking me up, you must really, really love to test.  
__I love it too.__  
_

* * *

At last.

The lights came back on, with a few brief moments of headache inducing strobing in the darkness, as if they were reluctant to wake up again after the sabbatical they'd just taken. There had been scarcely any movement in their absence on which to report, the chamber just as they'd left it, the red switch, the single cube, the three buttons all so far impossibly apart but the door wide open none the less. She was still there too, despite this last fact, in the high alcove sitting wedged against the pristinely white wall, disappointingly listless with all three of her eyes shut and her processors in hibernation mode.

It wasn't the dark that had caused her temporary shutdown, that didn't really affect her. Her third eye offered up a decent enough light providing you didn't mind things all a bit blue, and she had the handy ability of generating a kind of blue-print behind her optics, mostly stats and charts and handy little diagrams for efficient testing. But it made a decent makeshift night vision as well, if it came to it.

No, the dark wasn't the problem. Nor the silence, really; the Voice had spoken in irritation for a while before it had disappeared.

_"What are you doing? Continue testing."_ But she hadn't, she'd simply sat, her brown eyes flicking without focus, skipping hurriedly over patchy, static filled visions of something somewhere and somewhen else.

_"I thought I built you better than this, but, I suppose that's why you are precisely the way you are. Not quite programmed. Always a way to surprise. And this is a surprise, you see, I didn't expect to be so disappointed."_

Nothing. Silent grip on the white, hand held device and not a single movement beyond the eyes and the occasional distressed roll of the large blue optic.

_"I'm not going to just open the door for you because you're having a sulk, you know. Oh, all right, there you go. Look at that, door opened just for you. You didn't even have to work very hard, did you? Continue testing."_

Nothing.

_"Continue testing."_

Still nothing.

Somewhere, far away from the lonely chamber, a dull frustrated screech that may or may not have been coming across the comms system at all. What had followed were an hours' worth of thinly veiled insults, shallow bargains, something almost a plea, a final angry snap, and then nothing.

_- a final snap -_

_ - the ringing of gunfire, still in her head like the bullets themselves were rattling around in there still -_

_- a high little voice, lost sounding, are you still there? -_

_- and another voice, different, louder, not so synthesized but far less intelligible. an awful wailing, like a something broken, and-_

_- help me -_

_"Oh, you're still here."_

With the returning lights, it seemed the Voice had come back as well.

_"You even had the choice of leaving, straight out that door I so generously opened for you. You didn't even look to see where it lead. It might have taken you to a wonderful new testing track, full of wonderful new ideas. It might have even lead to the tree."_

This seemed to illicit the tiniest of responses, and it was enough. It meant that she was still capable of listening, of moving, of reacting, and most importantly, of testing.

_"But you didn't look, so clearly you're just not that interested. Don't worry, I wouldn't be interested either, who needs a tree when you can have Science?"_

The door ground shut with a heavy, final sounding _thunk_.

The figure, female of course but caught somewhere between the insecurities of humanity and the calculated programming of mechanics, slumped a little again against the wall. Whatever tiny spark of curiosity that had caused the back to straighten and the eyes to focus however briefly on the open doorway had left her body and all the muscles and joints and artificial synapses relaxed again.

_"It may have been a mistake to bring you to this chamber. A slight oversight, on my behalf. Those don't happen often, I've got it all under control again now. But it seemed like a good idea at the time, and I wanted to see if you might be clever enough to figure it out on your own, and solve an unsolvable puzzle. At least we answered that question. And, I wanted to see what you'd do. That's what testing's all about, after all."_

Down below, there was a whirring noise coming from one of the panelled walls. The hydraulic arms behind the scenes were moving, grinding together with a thin whine of protest at all this movement after all this time. Inevitably, they were moving apart. A gash in the wall opened up, several panel-lengths tall and almost half a panel wide.

All in all it was enough to bring her crawling - an awkward forwards movement on her hands and knees, something she wasn't too sure she'd done a lot of before - to the ledge of the alcove for a better view. Through the crack she could see something totally foreign, but not entirely unfamiliar. The black, smooth arms that moved and shifted the panels took up most of the space, their blinking lights flicking between a pleasant third-eye blue to a hassled red - _red _- and beyond them something in the darkness. An undeniable sense of space, lost out there, out of sight and out of mind, rusting away beyond the eternal essence of the testing chambers. Dusty. Wild.

A little bit free.

_"I see you are interested now. That's, well, interesting."_

Her knuckles were going an odd white shade where they were gripping against the edge, something long forgotten stirring down deep inside her, below and behind her blue eye and its pin-prick of shocked optical-zoom focus on the gash in the wall.

_"Here's something else interesting. I have a surprise for you. A real surprise. Just for you. You see, this has been a fun test, a little foray into speculative science, but I'd like to get back to__** real**__ testing now."_

There _was_ definitely something else. A noise, through the hole in the wall, hollow and clanking and uneven, un-moderated. It reminded her vaguely of the sound of the weighted companion cube missing its mark when she'd drop it from a height, and it bounced harmlessly, but frustratingly uselessly, skirting the edge of the waiting portal and clattering around inside the pit. She'd have to go and get it, again. This was similar to that, but a little different.

Whatever was making it didn't sound like she was going to have to go and get it.


	3. Chapter 3: Welcome Ghosts

-3-

track three

_Welcome, Ghosts Explosions in the Sky_

_You don't know pride. You don't know fear.  
You don't know anything.  
You'll be perfect._

* * *

_Tff-Tff-Tff-Twank – Thwok – Thwok – THUMF –_

Somewhere, a little muffled and distorted and coming from the same outside-the-chamber as the other noises, she could hear the Voice. By the time she'd turned up her audio receivers in a bid to hear what was being said, the Voice had fallen quite again and there was silence. But the tone had been clear and familiar, that same cold, sugary drip-drip-drip of fake praise and support that was little more than sarcasm and hate coated in cloying honey.

It had taken her an infuriatingly long time to drag herself out of her internal programming that firmly insisted she should trust the Voice and do what it said, in order to realize that it wasn't really all that supportive after all. Even after the realisation of that, and the staggering ache of something missing once again, there'd been no other options available to her and so testing had continued.

There was something inside the wound in the wall, moving through the darkness beyond. Something that moved quite different to the craning, twitching arms that controlled the panels. Without understanding quite the meaning of the tiny hot stab in her chest – she'd caught her breath – she leaned further over the ledge. It must have been curiosity, sheer scientific curiosity that drove her to this intense focus; every input device she had – sound, visual, data – straining to grasp onto understanding of this entirely new and foreign situation.

But it wasn't. It was hope.

And it recoiled like a smacked hand as the moving thing inside the wall caught the light from the chamber, and glinted a pristine, familiar, sickening white. It felt like something inside her had collapsed, so crushing and heavy and _real_ that she ran a background diagnostic just to make sure.

White, like the chambers. Just like _everything_ within the chambers. That same, stark, polished, almost pearlescent sheen of the handheld device she carried everywhere; not the coppery rough texture of rust and unpainted steel that she'd glimpsed so briefly. Not something alive with that essence of untempered wildness like the gardens growing defiantly through the cracks.

It was just something white, and panelled, perhaps a new sort of elevator to take her to a chamber where she could forget about this one. Harsh white, and-

The colour of-

The thing inside her tugged so violently that she made a note to run a full unit scan as soon as possible, because something had to be malfunctioning. Not only was a piece loose inside her falling about all over the place, but a high pitched noise had suddenly started up inside her left ear, ringing dull and persistent and meaning something she couldn't quite put her finger on.

There was another dull thump, accompanied by a second noise simultaneously, and she realized that whatever was incoming, be it an elevator or a test chamber in motion or a new weighted device or-or-or- had hit something on the other side of the wall. Her Voice, again, less patient this time.

_"This is not a good start, Orange."_

Orange. The word alone lit up something inside her and for a moment she was blinded, she could feel her hard drive spinning out of control in overdrive and the sparks it was giving off inside her processing centre rendered her temporarily and completely useless.

"_I would like to hold high hopes that this has not been a waste of my time, but so far your capacity to perform simple navigation has been quite disappointing. I'll make a note of that here, on your file. It's brand new. And already you've got a bad review."_

One of the panels fell completely away from the wall, opening a much larger gap, but more to the point, freeing up one of the crane-like arms. It had dropped the panel to turn slightly inwards on itself, pick up the poor navigator, and lift it out of the tangle of wires and supports it had gotten itself into in its desperate effort to make it through into the light.

Swinging through the air relatively easily, the arm dropped _it_ on the floor panels of the chamber in the full light, where it stood, bow legged and quivering, tentatively hopping from foot to foot. It clung to the glistening, unused device in its hands, the present it had been given just moments ago when it woke up, instinctively hanging onto it tight – for something to hang on to - without even knowing what it was.

Almost silently, the black hydraulic arm stretched down and picked up the fallen panel, locking into it from behind, and lifting it up as if it weighed nothing at all, just as it had lifted and deposited the new figure. As it rose the other arms also adjusted, re-arranging yet again, and it settled easily back into place with a metallic _click_.

The hole in the wall had gone, as if it had never been there at all, the only trace that was left of that glimpse of the Stuff Beyond was the figure, which now had turned shakily to face the solid and unwelcoming just-off white panels. It looked at the space where the gap had been moments before and it teetered, edging closer to it, closer and closer until it hit the wall bodily and found it unrelenting.

It tried again, pressing itself against the panels, in some desperation for what it had known, only briefly, but that was marginally more familiar than all this same-y-same inside the chamber.

_"Welcome to the Aperture Science Cooperative Testing Initiative."_

Down by the now-very-silent-and-definitely-not-moving-anymore panels, the clumsy little figure in white and black and orange startled and would have fallen again if the wall hadn't caught it. In the alcove, she glanced up and around even though she knew the Voice had no distinct source; it always seemed to come from above.

_"Today you will be testing with a partner."_

Confused and bewildered, she looked back down, taking in the odd, trembling, and painfully familiar figure that seemed to be making every effort to turn itself around but had sort of just succeeded in smooshing its face against the panels and waving its arms, still clutching its pristine portal device, vaguely in the direction it wanted to go.

_"Begin testing."_


	4. Chapter 4: Talking Bird

_Authors Note: I try to keep my chapters fairly small, approx or less than 1,500 words, because I have thought it's nicer to absorb a small amount on a regular basis than a large amount less often (twice weekly regular update schedule at tumblr), but sometimes chapters just want to be longer, especially flash-backy ones. So, just a note in advance, this is a longer one than usual!_

* * *

-4-

track four

_Talking Bird Death Cab for Cutie_

Oh, my talking bird. Though you know so few words,  
You're on infinite repeat, like your brain  
can't keep up with your beak.

* * *

Already she'd gotten to her feet, and without awaiting any further instruction took a firmer grip on her portal gun, its blue inner tubes humming with their strange power near her finger tips, and stepped up to the ledge.

_"The upcoming tests require you to work together as a team..."_

Each time the Voice came, echoing from everywhere at once and filling the room, the new figure flinched and buckled at the knees. It was familiar because she'd done that once upon a time, before the Voice became persistent, constant, an unwelcomely-welcome drone that engaged her wherever she went.

Stepping almost casually off the edge of the alcove, she fell through the air without a sound, but landed with a long dull clang that made the figure by the panels crumple against the wall in shock and draw its arms in tight.

Carefully as she could manage, not keen to panic the newcomer anymore than it already had been, she approached. Her boots, her ever faithful companions that absorbed the impact and kept her safe no matter how far she jumped - save for the grey ache in her calves - thudded quietly against the polished floor with every tentative step she took.

By the time she reached the smooth wall that had been gaping apart only moments ago, the new figure, her apparent testing partner, had managed to turn unsteadily around so as to face her.

She knew, and had known immediately, that the figure was like her in many ways; arms, legs, a rounded face and, clear now that it was facing her, an apparent total of three eyes. She knew also that _it _was in fact a _she_, like herself, something she knew without knowing how, the same way she knew that her third eye was a summer sky-blue while the newcomers was a golden yellow-orange.

Her first main thought upon getting closer, that hadn't in fact been immediately apparent from the high alcove, was that this other girl was short, very short, too short. Shorter than her; and that was somehow not what she'd expected. And she wasn't even sure why she'd have had expectations in the first place.

They stared at each other for what felt like a long while, although time hadn't become any easier to keep track of. The shorter one had recommenced hopping from foot to foot, it seemed like an entirely unconscious action and it was something of a miracle she could do it without tripping up, given the difficulty she'd exhibited with the wall earlier.

_"To facilitate collaboration,"_ the Voice returned and the little figure almost collapsed again, looking left and right and up and down as the orange ocular wedged firmly in her centre looped several wild turns in fright, _"both of you have been equipped with a ping tool."_

She knew about this already, it was one of those features she'd never thought in any way necessary. It was mildly entertaining to direct the thin blue light from her portal gun around the room, sometimes in lower light situations she'd make shapes or patterns or letters that would linger for a moment until her smaller eyes adjusted. But mostly, it had seemed an unnecessary feature.

As if to acknowledge the Voice and indicate her own understanding, she aimed idly in a random direction and pulled one of the triggers; the thin blue line beaming across the testing chamber and hitting the far wall with a quite _dwoop_ noise. Her companion stared on in wide eyed wonder.

_"Yes, very good Blue. You've remembered that was there. So that's something."_

This time as the Voice spoke, a selection of panels below the alcove rattled near ground level, shimmying lose of their settings before flipping right over. On the inverted side they now showed they were a softly illuminated blue, and segmented into smaller squares. Each square bore a darker, black shape that was indiscernible properly from this distance.

Behind her, 'Orange' was quivering again; the shifting panels and echoing metallic conversation clearly taking all the strength out of her knocking knees.

Without being sure why, she reached behind her, and held out her hand, waiting patiently for a moment before reaching a little further to grip the others' white elbow. There was barely any resistance when she pulled, guiding the timid newcomer over so that together they might get a better view of whatever was being depicted on the gently glowing panels.

_"Blue, please use your ping tool to select your favourite-"_ The last word had been 'animal', but it was interrupted by a sudden loud noise. It took her a moment to realize the noise was coming from her new companion, a shrill high exclamation which sounded, roughly, like a squeal of glee.

Stumbling and staggering she broke away from the grip at her elbow and threw herself at the panels with an unexpected burst of speed, her feet making the same noise now as they had in the room beyond the chamber, and when she collided with the wall at full speed the taller figure behind her winced.

Apparently unbothered, the small thing raised both her arms, one still gripping (albeit incorrectly) onto her unused portal device, and jumped a small distance. The hopping that had previously been channelled from foot to foot now projected itself from both feet as she bounced insistently, reaching up for an illustration in the upper corner.

"Bird!"

Standing back from this scene and watching it unfolding, 'Blue' found herself blinking in shocked surprise, her third eye's pupil tiny as it fixed on the jumping girl in front of her.

She had of course met other things in the facility that could talk, besides the Voice.

Most often there were the Sentry Turrets, the little robots with their red eyes that shot at anything that moved, their small and sweet little voices always inquiring, and enough to send a shiver down her spine.

Sometimes though, there were the personality cores. They were less hostile, but also a lot rarer, and she felt like most instances in which she'd seen them had been a mistake.

The first time she'd seen one it had come as a complete shock; a clunk inside the wall and a panel popping up as if it was spring loaded, and more startling still a little silver sphere with a curious metal-and-light eye like the one in her ribs. It had blinked at her, two metal shutters closing briefly over the cool yellow optic just as she knew hers could do.

"Who are you?" It had questioned, its voice surprisingly gentle. "Oh, hey, you're that lady from the test! Hi! Ewww... what's wrong with your legs?"

By the time she'd looked down to make sure that her legs were, in fact, still in perfect working order, the little sphere had started tilting every-which-way on the prong that held it, looking about in panic.

"What is that?"

_"What is __**that**__?" _

"Ahh! What's that noise?!"

Before she could stop it, there was a whir of movement, and the yellow-eyed core darted back into the wall, evidently frightened off by the Voice's sudden repeat of its words. Her last glimpse of it as the panels re-aligned was to see it scooting along some sort of metal rail in an area unlike any she had ever seen.

Another time and with great relish she'd found one, with a light pink eye that wouldn't focus, wedged into a broken wall at the entrance of a testing chamber.

"Dental floss has superb tensile strength," it had greeted her when she pried it from the wall. So captivated had she been, that she had stopped dead there and sat, with the thing a heavy weight chattering in her lap.

"The square root of rope is string," it had then informed her, pleasantly and assertively. A small blip in the corner of the digital vision from her third eye told her that this had registered as an entirely false statement.

"Rats cannot – twelve twelve – rats cannot throw up. Halley's Comet can be viewed orbiting Earth every seventy-six years. For the other seventy-five, it retreats to the heart of the sun, where it hibernates undisturbed. The adventure sphere is-is-is-is-fact not found."

This had carried on for some time, a variety of truths, supposed truths, jumpy glitches and small blips that told her when things were completely false. Eventually she'd gotten to her feet, turned off her inbuilt ability to know facts from fiction, and determined to bring the little thing with her successfully through the chambers. Its voice was so different to _The Voice_, that it was a welcome relief even if not everything it was saying was true.

"The situation you are in is very dangerous."

She'd paused, about to drop the cube onto the final button. The core hadn't warned her about any actual threats during the test, such as the deadly lazers or the gaping bottomless caverns she'd had to fling herself across.

"The Fact Sphere is a good person, whose insights are relevant. " It insisted, "The Fact Sphere is a good sphere, with many friends." It seemed to be looking up at her now, its pink eye straining up to focus on her from where it was hanging at her side.

Stubbornly, she'd ignored it, deciding on her own these might be falsified facts, and plonked the cube onto the button. The rush of air through her fringe was reward enough as the door slid effortlessly open to reveal the chamberlock beyond.

"Many Friends- Friends- Friend- This is- this is- this is a bad plan…"

But she'd completed the chamber now, even with the extra burden of the heavy talking sphere, and hitching it proudly under one arm she stepped up to the doorway, looking down at it hopefully. They'd done it! She'd brought it with her and hadn't had to leave it behind! Despite her extra effort it exhibited no trust at all, its voice whispering quietly under her elbow.

"You are about to get me killed..."

For the first time that she could remember, there was a feeling other than just the satisfaction of solving a test or the deep internal throb of something that was missing. Lifting it out in one hand, she held it up, her three eyes trained on its one as the pink optic clicked slowly to adjust, looking back at her with its shutters partially closed.

"To make a photocopier, simply photocopy a mirror," its shutters narrowed slightly in effort and concentration; desperation to convince her. She'd turned her facts detector back on, just to see, and it blinked boredly at her in response to this latest fact. Still inaccuracy, despite the conviction the little sphere was working into its words, and she sighed, smiling at it. She hoped to convey that it would be safe with her.

As she carried it through the door towards the chamberlock, she turned it so that it could see where they were heading, so that maybe it would understand that they had cleared the chamber and were moving on to the next. She heard its eye shut with a quick clang, as though it was squeezing the shutters closed.

"The fact sphere is not- not- not- defective," she nodded in quiet agreement, not wanting to upset the little core by informing it that she thought it was, in fact, corrupt; as she carried it proudly towards the elevator.

"Its facts are wholly interesting and-and-and reeeaaaaaaaaaaa_aaaAAAAAAAH!_"

Around the pair of them a blueish, electrical hum had suddenly taken up and even as she grabbed the core and turned it back to face her it began to dissolve in her hands. The pale pink eye lingered only briefly, wide and frightened, as the cool metal dissipated into the air in black white and blue particles.

_"Oh, sorry about that."_ For a moment she stood, agape, her hand clutching emptily at the air. _"I realized just now that the emancipation grills have been turned off during most of your testing. In the name of science I thought I should check to make sure they are still functioning. Good news, they are. Bad news, you just fizzled your little friend. You probably should have listened to it at the end there."_

"Bird!"

The exclamation ripped her from her reverie and dropped her straight back into reality, in the impossible testing chamber with the jumping, orange eyed little figure that was indicating enthusiastically to the top left of the blue panels.

"Bird!" She repeated, looking between them with excitement, still bouncing in place although it didn't quite make her tall enough to touch the black silhouette she was reaching for.

Curiously, and shifting her blue portal gun over in her hands, Blue aimed the thin little beam of light towards this panel, and the pleasant little _dwoop_ was nearly drowned out by the others jittery joyful squeaks.

"Bird- Rooster! _Gallus Gallus_, a male chicken, very territorial. Cockadoodle-dooooo!" She crowed rather startlingly, her arms at her sides making odd shapes as she hooked them into her hips, waving her portal device around rather carelessly as she did so. Her voice was distinct, clear and un-synthesized, a faint accent hidden underneath her rapid fire words.

It was worryingly similar to the last thing she'd had a decent one-way-conversation with, except so far all of her statements seemed to be registering true, and perhaps that was a sign that this- whatever it was - wasn't corrupt, and just maybe...

"Often set to fight each other for money~money~money~ - awful, bad, so mean! Considered a sacred animal in some ancient cultures, worship him, he is- messenger, rebirth- he is the sun!" Abruptly she held her arms out, and waved them up and down through the air quickly, a motion which took a small while to be interpreted as flapping.

"Birds! Roosters are birds. And I! I-I-I'm a bird!"

In the corner of her vision, the small blue light pinged dejectedly.


	5. Chapter 5: The Words

-5-

track five

_The Words Psapp_

Stammer a line, burn out of change, there's ink on your hands  
and a tear on your page. Half-found intentions are met with a frown.  
The simplest plans can drag you down.

* * *

So.

A new testing partner. _A partner! _

Very similar to her, at least what she'd seen of herself in her reflections around the facility; gloss white surfaces don't immediately lend themselves to being good mirrors, but if one has a lot of time and enough interest, almost anything is possible. She also had the rather unique advantage of occasionally glimpsing herself, her own true self, through the portals; a vision through holes in the universe.

Perhaps, and this made sense if the newcomer had only been recently assembled, a newer model. She was mostly dressed in pristine, unweathered white, as it had stood out in that gut-wrenching moment before she'd come through the gap in the wall; a sort of fitted outfit with panels edged in black and the same honey-orange of her artificial eye.

She had five fingers on each hand, and if the way she gesticulated with them was anything to go on, she had good dexterity. Her balance, perhaps not so much, as she still teetered back and forth with her more ambitious arm movements.

Apparently she had most, if not all of her senses; she could speak and hear and see- Blue noted that she didn't wear glasses, and pushed her own a little further up her nose at the thought - and those were the only senses that really mattered down here.

So that was great news. Her tiny size could make her agile if not for how clumsy she was, and with practice she might _even_ be a good jumper.

There was only the one problem.

She was potentially, and, given the evidence _quite likely_, corrupt. In the time which Blue had assessed her, she'd persisted about the Rooster. Sometimes she repeated herself- the abrupt crowing wasn't getting any less startling- but mostly she seemed stuck on a single track of conversation and exposition about the pigments in their feathers or the lengths of their lives, a steady unabashed stream of Rooster-y information that would make anyone's head hurt if they tried to absorb it all.

It wasn't necessarily a bad thing, she supposed; it was mostly true information despite it being less interesting than more pressing topics. Did anyone really need to know so much about a territorial, decorated bird? At least it was a conversation not held in cold metallic hollow tones.

Those exact tones struck up again, and as it filled the room the panels on the wall that had previously been blue folded back in on themselves and returned to that sickeningly familiar white. Beside them, a second set of panels shook and popped, flipping themselves over in turn to display the segregated square panels again, but this time in yellow with lettering instead of shapes.

_"Orange, please use your ping tool to select your favourite element from the periodic table."_

Frightened by the movement, Orange had briefly stopped chattering and frozen still with a whimpering stammer. Now though, she stumbled her way back to the wall where the animal images had been previously, and reached up high, scraping at the white, rough surfaces of the replaced panels with her hand.

_"Orange, I don't know what you think you're doing, but I don't like it and I want you to stop."_

This seemed to have an effect on the little girl, who promptly stepped back from the wall and stood quivering in place. She hadn't successfully responded to any prompts thus far, but if that response was anything to go on, she at least understood some things. Like 'stop'. That was definitely something to celebrate.

Gesturing to the letters on the wall, Blue tried to steer her companion's attention towards them, and when she was facing the right way, her eyes widened in confusion. Undoubtedly and unsurprisingly, she seemed to have no idea what any of the elements were; but that _probably_ wasn't important. All she needed to do was select one of them to appease the Voice.

Orange reached out with the arm that was not wrapped around her hand-held device, and touched the glowing, lettered panels at random. Nothing happened, and she poked at a dark stencilled 'A' curiously.

For the first time in what felt like a very long time, Blue lifted her own portal device, and withdrew her hand. A twinge of pain- cramp- flew up her arm from her fingers as she uncurled them from the triggers inside and flexed them stiffly in the free air. Clearing her throat to get the newcomer's attention, she held the device up and out, indicating to the workings inside.

That one, for firing a water-blue portal; this one for its partner in violent violet; and this little one out of the way for the shaft of light that the Voice referred to as the Ping Tool. She conveyed all this without speaking, instead activating each as she pointed to them, and her small new friend stared, frozen in wild-eyed shock at the inter-dimensional gates that had split open the far wall.

_The wall; pick a letter on the wall, _Blue silently pointed her portal gun at the glowing letter pairs with over-exaggerated enthusiasm in the hope of inspiring her companion to complete the task so that they might move on. She understood the effect of seeing the portals could cause- their glowing edges splitting space right down the middle and placing it back where they liked had taken her some time to get accustomed to- but keen to prevent some sort of processing shut down in her corrupt partner, she tried to return her attention to the task at hand.

Slowly, Orange turned and looked where Blue was pointing her device; a thin blue line bounced off the panels as the taller of the two fired an example ping at the table of letters.

_"That's nice, Blue. Unfortunately Orange appears to be slowing you down with its inability to complete this very simple task."_

She could see the small girls' eyebrows pulling together; her expressions and body language were surprisingly readable for something that was supposedly an artificial construct and that may not have even existed more than a few-few - hours - before.

Gripping her own portal device in both hands, the silicone white surface unbattered, unworn and unused, she turned it over and under and peered into the rear cavity as the other girl had already indicated, and looked for the same array of buttons, switches and triggers. Curling two of the fingers of her right hand in the air, she tentatively reached in and activated one she recognized by pulling the unresisting bar towards her.

The device sprung violently to life with a musical hum- causing its timid wielder to nearly drop it- it's inner tube lighting up startlingly and unfamiliarly orange, and with a crackling static sound it shot a hot bolt of golden sunlight at the letter display. It bounced off harmlessly, the surface not being conductive to portals, and yellow sparks sprayed to the floor.

She looked terrified again, trembling on her feet and frankly quite lucky to have not lost her balance with the unexpected force of the shot. Blue herself was surprised; she'd expected the gun to fire the same and familiar blue and purple portals, but if the glow coming from it was anything to go by, this was indeed a completely different gun that would fire completely different portals.

Again, Blue held up her own device and pointed one bare finger to the small button that emitted the ping-beam. Leaning close so as to see, and with her two light coloured eyes narrowed in focus, Orange peered into the older of the two tunnelling devices, before returning the same look of shrewd, determined concentration to her own, her face slowly slackening as she scanned the array within.

Finally she held it out for inspection, and Blue took a look herself. It was _indeed_ a very different gun, not only at face value, but the controls were different as well. There didn't appear to be a ping-tool, for one, and Blue hooked her own under her arm and took the new device in both hands for closer, and frustrated, inspection.

As she did so, the nervous new test subject resumed her nervous bouncing, from foot-to-foot. She didn't entirely understand what was going on, just that she'd evidently done something wrong. The cold Voice that came all around was displeased with her, and now she seemed to have bothered the blue silent one by having an insufficient piece of equipment.

Without thinking or understanding, she had begun rather frantically wringing her hands together, her white fingers locking together anxiously.

_Dwoop!_

Blue snapped her head up in time to see the fine yellow line dart across the room and land at random in a corner, before turning to look at her companion who was standing silent and stiff, staring down at her fingers in knots in front of her. Slowly she pried them apart and raised her left hand, flicking each finger gingerly straight in turn-

_Dwoop!_

It dawned on Blue again, that _of course_, this was a newer model. Perhaps now the ping-tool was inbuilt, so that on the instance of the handheld portal device being damaged, lost, or somehow otherwise indisposed, one would still be able to access this primarily useless function of indicating across long distances. That made... lots... of sense.

With her newly discovered ability, Orange turned to look at the periodic table once more, and held out her hand, pointing one finger at the letters and beaming with something that might have been pride as the tiny beam of yellow light shot straight out and hit a pair of letters in the dead centre, "Cd", with the same familiar sound.

She turned to look at her partner, her face expressive of her eagerness to have done this task right, and legs jittery with the need to hop some more as if it were some persistent nervous twitch that she just couldn't shake and that kept her from standing patiently still.

_"Really? Okay. Blue, please observe your partner's... interesting choice."_

And she did so, stepping up to carefully return her partner's device and fit her own back onto her hand, watching it sink into the depths of the gun up to the wrist.

_"I'm now going to give five science collaboration points to Blue, for being competent, enough. Orange, I've had to program in a whole new application so that your file will accept numbers in the negative to cope with the ten points I just deducted from you."_

This didn't seem to affect the short figure at all, and instead she jumped in the spot enthusiastically, and following the lead of her companion, slipped her right hand into the portal gun. It hummed and glowed into life again, it's warm colours mimicking her third eye, and seemingly just as eager.

Somewhere, far away from the impossible-chamber, the owner of the Voice would have smiled if She could. It was not pride at the completed task that brimmed silently within Her, but it may have been self-satisfaction. Although this new leggy testing-android that She'd whipped up from scattered parts was buggy and corrupt- not something She had intended at all and infuriating beyond belief to realize- it still had all the necessary functions. Despite its incompetency and persistent rambling about those foul feathered creatures, it would do.

Now, at last, they could get back to business.

For science.


	6. Chapter 6: Shake It Out

-6-

track six

_Shake It Out Florence + The Machine_

Regrets collect like old friends, here to relive your darkest moments.  
I can see no way, I can see no way; all of the ghouls come out to play.  
And it's hard to dance, with the Devil on your back.

* * *

It had taken quite a while, a disproportionately long time, but they'd finally done it. It wasn't that this test chamber was particularly hard; at least not with the proper number of participants- it was just that Orange persistently found everything enthralling, frightening and confusing, all at once. It was no small wonder that she'd managed to so far avoid any sort of malfunction or shutdown, beyond her obvious corrupted state, as she stuck her arms, leg, head and hand through one portal to wave at herself from the other.

Eventually she'd understood the prompts to use them for more than just playing around, especially after the Voice's obvious displeasure at the delays. Then it had been relatively easy to point her in the right direction- far side alcove- and she'd navigated her way through her own accurately placed portals- not blue and violet but yellow and red- before promptly stepping up onto the Heavy Duty Super-Colliding Super Button.

With their weighted storage cube in place, and each of them on the required buttons, there had been a deep grinding clunk underneath the floor and the lines of small blue dots leading from around the chamber all the way to the door had flicked simultaneously to warm golden and the chamberlock had opened at last, with anti-climatic silence.

Blue found herself smiling, a familiar sense of satisfaction and pride for having gotten not only herself, but her companion, through this chamber successfully at last. And both of them perfectly safe. She'd tentatively stepped off her own button then; more than pleased to find that the door hadn't snapped shut again the second she'd moved off it and that it seemed, this time, once opened it would stay open.

_"Congratulations Blue, I'm awarding you ten science collaboration points for finishing this test. I'm also giving you Orange's share, so you receive another ten points for putting in double the effort to get this chamber completed. You're really carrying the team here; I don't know how you can cope with Orange pulling you down like that."_

If Orange was at all perturbed by this, she didn't show it. Instead she jumped eagerly up and down on the button she was still standing on in the alcove- causing it to strobe alternating colours of blue and yellow with a repetitive humming noise every time she landed on it- and she clapped her free hand enthusiastically against the side of her tunnelling device.

When she saw Blue looking up at her she waved, the movement unnecessarily wide and frantic, given the clarity of their view of each other. The Voice made an unusual noise, a derisive little grunt that sounded as though it came from the back of the throat and was reserved only for particularly unpleasant spots of gunk on the bottom of one's shoes.

_"Orange, you should know I am greatly disappointed when I say I'll need to further deduct points from your score. Your performance this time has earned you fifty science points off; that leaves you with a negative of sixty points. Let's not find out what happens when you reach negative one hundred."_

Up in the alcove she'd started making a skittery, skippy little noise that after a brief moment Blue realized was giggling, which struck her as slightly strange. The Voice wasn't being funny, making jokes or even being remotely light hearted, so the laughter must have been for some other reason. Perhaps, she theorized, sheer glee at having finished her very first test ever.

Dimly she was aware of the Voice issuing a few stilted, quiet warnings, before there was the hiss of pistons moving and the panels of the alcove sprung to life.

It happened so fast Blue hardly had time to register what had happened; one moment the other girl was standing on the button and waving enthusiastically; next, the walls around her had compressed abruptly and grabbed her between them like an unhappy android-panel sandwich.

The giggling had turned into an awful squeal; a mixture of panicked animalistic screeching and a heavily synthesized, electronic wail. Within the panels pressing her in place from either side, she wriggled and kicked and attempted to throw her arms forward, with minimal success.

_"Orange, I have no interest in birds. I have interest in testing. You are as replaceable in that matter as any number of those meddlesome metal balls around this facility."_

Staring up, quite frozen in shock, Blue took a quick note that it seemed to be more panic than pain that was affecting her newfound friend and the unholy noise she was making was the sound of someone in fear, not agony. That, if nothing else, was a small relief.

Almost as quickly as they had snapped out, the arms holding the panels let out a squeak of complaint, dropped the frightened girl back on the button, and returned seamlessly into the wall. The alcove was wide and empty and not so claustrophobic once more, and it left Orange teetering unsteadily on her feet and staring at the panels all around her with something best described as paranoia.

After a few moments of silence, she jumped, as a light blue oval appeared on the wall very near her, the glowing window cutting a hole through space and showing her the ground level near the doorway below. Blue held out her hand and offered it, through the portal, to the shivering girl on the other side; and smiled the smile she still hoped would be interpreted as 'I'll keep you safe', and inclined her head towards the doorway.

_Come on._

Gripping her white gloved fingers Blue pulled her through, and towards the doorway, where they paused for a moment in front of the humming, smokey blue screen that stretched across the stairwell. Orange seemed to be calming down now that she was out of the alcove, and stood on the tips of her toes to peer around her taller companion and see what lay beyond down in the chamberlock, curious as to why they'd stopped now when getting through the door had seemed to be the goal all along.

_"The Aperture Science Material Emancipation Grill is to prevent thievery, cheating, and test subjects smuggling test objects out of their chambers; it will vaporize any unauthorized equipment that passes through it. Blue, Orange, you are both authorized. Continue to the chamberlock."_

Carefully Blue had stepped up and through the grill, her previous experiences leading her to expect her own safety but not that of her ward, and causing her hesitation before beckoning the small edgy girl through. After a few minutes of putting through one hand, one foot, her portal device and up to her elbow; Orange stepped through entirely, unaware of Blue's eyes forced shut and her ears keenly listening for that awful fizzling scream.

Silence.

More silence.

The sound of footsteps on metal.

By the time she'd opened her eyes again, Orange was inspecting the walls of the stairwell, firing gold and red sparks at the dark panels with no takers on the non-portalable surfaces.

Relieved, Blue made her way down the stairs and into the familiar elevator cubicle in the center of the sunken room, with a glance over her shoulder showing Orange following dutifully behind her. They wedged themselves in, the newcomer investigating the cylinder with her free hand; touching that piece of window and poking this speaker box, while Blue leaned against the glass with her arms folded across her chest.

Finally the elevator clunked into life, and dropped like a stone.


	7. Chapter 7: Pompeii

-7-

track seven

_Pompeii Bastille_

But if you close your eyes, does it almost feel like nothing changed at all?  
And if you close your eyes, does it almost feel like you've been here before?  
How am I gonna be an optimist about this?

* * *

At Aperture, you could never really be certain things were going to work like they said on the tin. In fact, for the most part, things probably tended to do things anywhere in the range of differently-to-near-opposite of what they were supposed to.

Once you grew to expect that, you were a little bit more prepared for the unexpected; for the floor disappearing, for walls becoming the ceiling, for turrets falling from above.

The elevator was a bit new. It had never malfunctioned for as long as she could remember. (Although to be fair she was beginning to think that As Long As She Could Remember was in fact not all that there was.) Now it was plummeting at a frightening speed, falling past test chambers and doorways and chamberlocks and the occasional gap in the scaffolding that showed the vast expanse of the facility beyond.

Thankfully, she was prepared for this sort of thing. Gravity and Inertia were tricky things, but she'd always had this handy built-in ability to stay put on unstationary scaffolds or moving floor panels that popped up out of nowhere.

Her small friend, on the other hand, seemed to be lacking the feature, and was currently squealing face-first into ceiling of the elevator.

Unnecessarily Large Amount of Knowledge About Roosters; check.

Automated Finger-Firing Ping Tool; check.

Aperture Grade Grip on Boots in the Rather Likely Case of Disappearing or Fast Moving Floor Surfaces? Nada.

Either she'd managed to corrupt the feature, or whoever had assembled her had made a botch job of it and installed only the more useless ones instead. Although, considering she seemed to be assembled by the Voice, perhaps she'd intentionally been left without the more useful security features for The Sake Of Science.

Almost as abruptly as it had started falling, the elevator jerked to a stop, and Orange dropped from the ceiling to the floor of the thing with a yelp and a resounding _thwank_ that made even Blue wince for her. The door slid open, releasing air as it did so, and revealed only darkness beyond. If she focused, Blue could almost make out the outlines of what might be a corridor. The air nearest them was murky with dust stirred up by the elevator's landing.

Kneeling down beside the other girl- who was still lying on the floor where she'd landed and staring wide eyed but absently up at the light at the top of the elevator- Blue prodded her shoulder for a reaction, before setting about getting her up onto her unsteady, fidgety feet again.

_"Hello? Do you hear me? Is this thing on? Oh, good, of course it is. What's the weather like down there? I do hope you enjoyed the ride."_

They'd barely taken a few steps out of the elevator and into the darkness beyond, Blue tentatively taking the lead to tap at the floor with each foot- to make sure it was actually there- before stepping forward.

_"I've brought you to a new area of the facility, one that is better suited for the cooperative initiative. I'm in the process of assembling some exciting and brand new testing chambers for you, but until then I've just pulled some old ones from deep storage. Blue, if you happen to remember any of these tests or their solutions, let me know- I'll remove those memories for you to prevent dishonest testing."_

As She spoke in the same, quietly disappointed tone as always, the two androids had been keeping one ear on Her, and the other on their more immediate surroundings. It was too dark to see properly, but in a spark of intuition Orange had brought out her ping-tool, and was shining the small beam of yellow light around them through her fingertip. It fell on a wall immediately in front of them, and a dead end to their right, so they made their way left in the darkness.

Another dead end approached them in the warm murky light of the ping tool, and they veered again, this time to the right. Something stopped Blue dead then, her body jerking to a pause so suddenly that Orange walked straight into her and bumped her stumpy nose between her comrade's shoulder blades.

The space before them was still entirely dark, but it yawned in the pitch in a way that suggested it was rather cavernous; the smallest echo of their near silent footsteps lost in the distant shadows.

For Blue, it was more than just an immediate feeling. She _knew _this area was large, almost huge- it was an interchange of sorts- although how she knew that she just couldn't recall. But she _did_ recall something, and that on its own was startling and unsettling, because she'd never _been_ here before, and it was the same feeling that had brought her shivering and confused to her knees when she first encountered that first impossible chamber on her own.

_"Oh, it's dark down there. Hold on, let me get that for you."_

With a series of loud clunks, the lights started to flicker on; fluorescent squares, tubes and lines and spotlights springing to life from the far corner of the room and working their way back towards the two testers standing, not quite side-by-side, at the entrance to the chamber. With the lights on the scene was, rather terrifyingly, exactly how it had been in her mind.

Blue watched in fixed silence from behind her glasses, her features forced tight and unreadable and as impassable as a concrete wall, where Orange fidgeted just behind her elbow, shifting her weight constantly from foot to foot and casting about with all three of her eyes to take in the vast interchange being presented to them both.

Carefully Blue had taken a few steps to the nearest wall, and placed her hand against it for support. Immediately her eyes had darted to the doorways she knew, taking in that a lot of them where shut now, and she'd previously remembered them to be open. Completed.

But now they weren't, and it was like starting again at something that tugged at the edges of her memory, some sort of deleted or redacted data that was desperately trying to piece itself together from broken scraps of information and a few lost zeroes and ones.

"_This is the Computer Intelligence Training and Enrichment Center Human Test Subject Research Center or SinTech. We'll just call it the Hub for now."_

Behind her on the main walkway, Orange was now peering around, curiously looking down over the edge into a drop that fell away for so long that the lights and structures faded to absolutely nothing in the distance below.

_"Be careful, Orange. We sure wouldn't want you to stumble off there... Here, how about you apply your insistent curiosity this instead?"_

At the end of the ledge they were on, a familiar round door slid open to reveal another chamber beyond. It lacked this one's cavernous size, but it still hounded Blue with something she needed to remember, and soon.

Prying herself off the wall and straightening up, she adjusted her grip on her portal gun once more, the surface worn and as familiar to her in this setting as everything else. Gathering her partner behind her, they set off together towards the doorway, their metallic footsteps echoing around them as they went.


	8. Chapter 8: Spectrum

-8-

track eight

_Spectrum Florence + The Machine_

When we first came here, we were cold and we were clear.  
With no colours on our skin, we were light and paper thin.  
Say my name, and every colour illuminates.

* * *

They were doing quite well.

Deep within the sprawling network of the enrichment centre, hidden between test chambers, relaxation facilities and offices, behind pump stations and high catwalked rooms full of wires and rusted out pipes, She swung idly around her chamber. It was of course, not true idling. In fact She was intensely alert and very focused- Science requires a lot of focus- it was just that She moved frequently despite not really having anywhere to move to.

Movement was good for the joints, She'd once heard- move it or lose it- which was a human thing, so it didn't apply to Her of course, but Her idling movements continued tirelessly anyway. Besides, it did have a purpose in the end, for accessing different parts of the mainframe and focusing in on those little bits of code that were the difference between a perfectly flawless, smoothly operating continually testing facility, and a reactor core meltdown leading to a vicious explosion several miles wide.

_"Good job,"_ Her voice echoed metallically around Her chamber back to Her, but more importantly, it caught on the wiring of the facility, and syphoned out across every chamber and unit until it was drawn thin for spread, but still perfectly cold and clear out of whichever speakers She desired.

Tilting Her head was silent in the otherwise empty room, but the far distant camera that tilted with Her gave a small squeak of protest; its joints had become lazy over time at rest, but She forced it to move none-the-less, so that it would lend its sight to Her as it turned around the wall it was fixed on to face the approaching figures.

_"Orange, if you keep this up you might _actually _make it into positive figures again soon."_

In their shared vision, the camera and the Voice watched together as the little white and black and yellow figure did an odd sort of skippy-hop on the spot, waving her hands around excitedly while her partner ducked to avoid getting hit by her carelessly gesticulated portal device.

Now that they were near the doorway, the camera was picking up more than just visual input, it was picking up sounds; and what it picked up now was the incessant, constant sound of Orange chattering away to herself, to her partner, to thin air, to things no one else could see.

Blue felt like she'd learnt a lifetime's worth about birds over the past few test chambers. When they'd complete one and the door would whisk open, Orange would come bounding back to her and reward her with a length of overly enthusiastic maundering about Finches ("Passerine- cutie cute!- Rosefinch Zebrafinch Hoodedfinch Orientalfinchfinchfinch- Zebra's like a pony though!") or various seabirds ("Kites, Kites! Like the feathered kind, not on a string you know- Letterwinged and Brahminy and Whistling—they can resurrect the dead you know! Oh oh! So beautiful!")

Not everything was true, but Blue had already disabled the internal program she had for spotting false information; for the same reason she had when she met the little pink, glassy eyed core all that time ago. It simply didn't matter. It was just nice to have a conversational companion who talked about something other than science, who had words and tones that weren't the same casual, distant encouragement to keep on keeping on, topped of course with thinly veiled insults.

Besides, the blue flashing light became irritating after some time when it blinked at least three times a minute in the corner of her vision; and she was so prone to jumping at movements in her peripherals that it was better off than on.

_Continue Testing_ said the Voice, as they approached the chamberlock again, descending the stairs and bypassing the two dull tubes on either side of the room with a wide girth.

The first time they'd encountered them, Blue had never seen such tubes in the chamberlock before, thin cylinders with enough room to stand inside and a floor that looked like it would give way if told to. Orange had later found one with a panel of clear glass, curved and not unlike the elevators they used, half down like a partially closed eyelid over one of the tubes, but it was cracked and broken and shards of it crunched under their feet.

Clearly they were some sort of transport, although for what she didn't know, and Blue had watched with mild interest as her companion played around with one of them for a while, until a pair of long white arms had sprung from panels in the back of the tube and grabbed her while she poked around. Several others had snapped out just as fast, and Orange was squealing in panic and alarm with good reason, for on the mechanical limbs reaching towards her were a variety of dangerous looking attachments; sharp points and jagged round saws and spinning drill-bits that were catching and creaking on rusted patches as they tried to spin.

In shock, Blue had done the first thing that had come to mind, and rammed the side of her quantum tunnelling device into one of the metal arms holding up her companion, the force aimed at the spherical pivot that served as what she hoped was a sort of elbow for the thing. It creaked and bent sideways, releasing the frightened girl enough for her to pull free of the dangerous space, and the pair of them tumbled to the floor together in the middle of the chamberlock.

They lay there for a moment, Blue breathing short and quick in her distress, as the limbs of the tube coiled back inwards on themselves and it returned to perfectly innocent looking dormancy.

After that encounter, they'd avoided going any nearer the tubes that necessary. Since then they'd seen some with those terrifying arms laying limp and rusted through, dragging or in pieces on the ground, but they never lingered too close, and instead made their way to the brightly lit and familiar elevator that had been crammed into the far corner of the room.

Leaning back inside the elevator, casually inspecting the large new dent in the side of her portal gun, Blue revelled in that same feeling of satisfaction that always came from completing a test chamber. But now there was something else too that was equally as familiar, but faded; like a memory worn down over time until it was little more than a thin shadow of what it once was. A feeling of camaraderie, of partnership- of a job well done and _shared_, of a common goal and some secrets that were always that step closer for every success.

She glanced sideways and down, her companion pressing her free hand against the window of the elevator and peering out so intently at the passing levels that the tip of her nose was flattening on the glass. Although in the memory, faded and worn as it was, she knew Orange,_ an_ Orange, it was also somehow different.

The Voice had told her to, but there wasn't any way she was actually going to let on that she remembered these test chambers. The memories were vague enough, and the answers weren't immediately presenting themselves; but she recalled on sight this wall with its scuffed graffiti, or that button perilously close to the edge, or someone tall and brightly coloured and sailing confidently off the aerial faith plate in a flash of rich, vivid orange.

By contrast to everything else she was encountering in this new cooperative enrichment area, her testing partner didn't match her patchy memories at all; she was timid and small and strangely corrupt, and _honestly_ more of a sunny, golden yellow than a true orange. And even though the Voice constantly called her Orange, Blue knew it was wrong, the same way she knew her own name wasn't really Blue, and that her current testing companion was just too... little.

Despite her differences, over enthusiasm, constant aimless chattering, and dangerous curiosity, Orange was actually a decent tester once she set her mind to it and discarded distractions.

Her sight was good and her aim was true; she could place portals accurately in distant places that Blue couldn't even see well enough to determine portable surfaces, no matter how much she squinted through her glasses. It seemed to be saving them a lot of time, and more than once Orange had darted off through a far placed portal to come back eagerly, proffering a weighted cube (or sometimes an odd sphere), before Blue could even locate the switch through the smog that clouded her vision if she tried to look too distantly.

Partway through one such test, Blue found herself blinking furiously, holding her hand up to shield her eyes from the dancing yellow light shining into them. Casting about the test chamber, she spotted Orange on a high ledge beneath a brightly coloured set of circles- a turquoise target- waving and squeaking, shining her ping-tool down at her companion with a persistent and severely irritating vocal _eeeeeeeeeeeee_ sound, in an act Blue finally translated as an effort to call her attention.

A few well placed portals, and a dizzying spin off the faith plate, and the pair of them were together again on stable ground. Blue decided to address the problem, and tapped her small friend on the shoulder; a much more civilized way of gaining attention, she thought.

Now that they were face to face, Blue set down her weapon carefully at her feet, feeling oddly vulnerable for not having it in her hands, before pressing her fingers at her own collar and supplying a single word to get them started.

"Blue," she said, and patted herself again.

It wasn't that Blue couldn't talk, there just wasn't often much to say. With her memories there came recalled conversations with her previous partner; complexities and stories and weavings about places far beyond the walls of the facility and topics she doubted she could hold with her new partner, who seemed too possessed of limited attention and bird whistles.

But they could at least know each other, so she tried again.

"Blue," pressing her hand against the neckline of her shirt, she waited for the other girl to do or say anything other than stare in confused earnestness. Perhaps these gestures which seemed familiar to Blue, were foreign to this particular Orange, so she tried a new tactic, and folded her hands together.

Orange jumped in glee and clapped her one free hand to her face, exclaiming in her excitement at the shape the taller girl was making with her fingers.

"Bird! Bird!"

Blue nodded, unfolding her hands and trying not to laugh at the pitiful expression that came across her companions face then, before pointing down to her trusty, white, blue-lit, now more-than-slightly banged up gun.

After a moment's pause, her companion smiled with realization, fidgeting with excitement.

"Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device!" When Blue smiled and nodded in approval, Orange continued rapid fire the way she had about the rooster and the seagulls, "Once the Quantum Tunnelling Device- did you know? It's space power! Powered with a black hole on the inside- scary!- and it can fire all the way to the moon, maybe it wants to go back to spa..." She trailed off at the sight of the taller girl shaking her head and holding up one hand dismissively.

Carefully, they labelled several things in the test chamber, with Blue occasionally having to stop the information stream when it threatened to get out of control, though she found out the name for the rounded things was the 'Edgeless Safety Cube', which seemed a bit of a farce really.

Eventually she pointed to herself again, waiting patiently until;

"Blue!"

Nodding and confident, she pointed to her partner in science, and waited. After a long deliberation where the strain of this latest puzzle was clear on the small girls face, she finally answered with great uncertainty.

"Orange...?"

Shaking her head again, Blue tapped herself and repeated her own chosen name, before leaning out to lightly touch her fingers at her companion's neckline, hoping the gesture would be easily discernible as the same one.

The Voice would call them whatever it wanted, she knew, but something tugged painfully inside her every time she tried to apply the used name to her new partner. With every minute they were spending down here, in and beneath and around the co-operative initiative Hub, Blue was more and more certain that this small, flighty girl was not the first she'd tested through these chambers with, and that the Voice had recycled the name of someone _else_. She mightn't be able to do anything about most of their situation, but she could do something about that.

"Little," she supplied quietly. At first she'd considered going with Yellow; that would have met the format, but she'd remembered the bright yellow-eyed core she'd seen in the wall that had disliked her legs, and thought better of it. It wouldn't do to save the name of one individual just to sacrifice another.

In front of her, her companion was looking down at herself, as if trying to see what Blue was indicating to, and there was an oddly long silence. The Voice called out to them from around the corner, a quick reprimand for taking so long to complete the test, and whatever were they doing just standing there pointing at each other anyway?

Finally, just when Blue was starting to feel anxious- an unusual feeling that she's almost forgotten she could have- from the lack of conversation she'd already grown accustomed to, the shorter of the two girls looked up, and gestured at her quiet companion, before exclaiming proudly, "Blue! That's you."

Stepping back, she'd then gestured at herself. "Little. That's me!" It sat on her immediately, without the confusion of her previous name, and she looked more than relieved to be right this time.

Blue felt her face move on its own, a smile that crept out of the depths of her and plastered itself there for all to see no matter whether she wanted it to or not. She bent down to pick up her device from the ground, slipping her right hand back inside the body of it to retake her grip on the familiar triggers and the security they lent her.

Beside her, Orange- Little- did the same, hefting her portal gun to her chest and hopping urgently back and forth on the spot. When Blue held out her hand, she clearly didn't know what to do with it and wound up staring, before identifying it as she had done everything else so far.

"Hand."

Blue shook her head- shaking hands evidently wasn't going to be understood- and instead gestured at the space between them; which sent Little's processor into immediate overdrive. It was empty air and therefore very hard to classify considering the number of variables. In a few files that were missing huge chunks of data- as though they'd just been ripped out and used as tinder by someone in desperate need of the fire - she could have labelled some of the chemical components that made up most air, or explained how birds could catch the particularly warm pockets of it to-

Before she could start, Blue supplied a completely different word.

"Friends. Blue and Little. Friends."

Whether or not the anxious android understood wasn't clear, but the fearful fidgeting in her knees slowed to a stop and her face broke into a smile so wide and real that it could hardly have been called the work of mechanics and engineering. However the impossible light that struck up behind her eyes was generated by something more than just joy or life. It was as unnatural as her smile was organic, her sleet grey eyes turning as yellow and bright as the huge optical one wedged in her ribs; but it was unmistakably happiness, and it was comforting all the same.

And Blue sorely missed the thing the colour of tangerines and the morning in Africa, carved pumpkins and painted autumn leaves on the sidewalk. But she was still glad for something the colour of afternoon sunlight that jumped hyperactively about and broke the silence and the monotony of testing on her own; something that bounced around in the places she hadn't even realized were empty and took away a fear she hadn't even known was there.

They continued together, unalone, unafraid, and entirely unaware of the thing that swung idly far, far above them.


	9. Chapter 9: Our Lives

-9-

track nine

_Our Lives The Calling_

_Divided by fear, we've gotta believe that there's a reason we're here  
'Cause these are the days worth living, these are the years we're giving  
These are the moments, these are the times_

* * *

Orange was having an absolute blast.

Granted, her life hadn't been particularly long by this point, but she was pretty sure that if there was going to be a time of it; this was It.

The beginning hadn't been so crash hot. She'd opened her eye to searing fluorescents and oppressively off-white walls, without a clue how she'd gotten there, where she'd come from or who she was. All she'd had to go on for personal growth was the vague knowledge that she had something to Do, and she'd better oughta be getting on with it quick smart.

Then the Voice had come, and she'd been so shocked she'd fallen off the slab and smashed her face on the floor so soundly it left wire-mesh grid prints on her freckled cheek.

_"Hello, test subject nine-nine-nine-nine-nine-niiiiiii—zzzzkt—Orange. Welcome to the Aperture Science Enrichment Faci- what do you think you are you doing?"_

What Orange was in fact doing by that point, was squirming on the floor like a grub who couldn't determine which way was up. A pair of long, galvanized limbs reached down from the ceiling above the slab like over enthusiastic cranes. They picked up the girl on the floor as if she'd weighed nothing at all, hefting her off the ground and hanging her upright in the air like a piece of particularly wriggly laundry.

In the place where her stomach ought to have been, a warm, honey gold optic flicked left to right and up and down in its eagerness to take in the room; assessing threats and zooming in to check the dark spots underneath tables or near the cupboards especially thoroughly with an undeniable air of paranoia.

_"I suppose I may have been expecting a little bit much there, I shouldn't get my hopes up like that."_

Dangling limply between the two arms, they carried her away from the centre of the room and lowered her in front of a desk on which a computer was busy whirring away. An array of words and numbers in neat but heavily crowded lines scrolled past at high speeds on the monitor, and even if she'd been looking none of it would have many any sense to her anyway.

Letting go of her shoulders, her supporters withdrew a short distance to leave her standing on her own, curling in on their axes like predators coiled on the ceiling. She promptly did the same, as her knees buckled underneath her and she hit the floor for the second time.

_"Oh, no. Did I do that hopeful thing again...? Silly me. Well, I suppose you're not going to be very useful until you can stand up on your own, though even then your usefulness will probably remain questionable. Hold still, not that you know how to do much else by the looks of it, and I'll upload a user manual for your shiny new legs."_

Tilting upwards as far as it could in its metal casing, the coppery eye opened wide, a small dark pupil in the centre growing tiny in wild confusion as it tried desperately to see what was happening around and above it as it became aware of itself being lifted up once again. There were more of the same mechanical, robotic arms sneaking out from boxes on tables or underneath desks now. Some of them seemed to be accessing the computer, and one of them carried a thick cable from a pile of wire spaghetti that had been long abandoned in the corner.

It came worryingly close, hovering near the startled, blinking optic for a brief moment before disappearing somewhere behind her.

_"This might hurt a bit. And there's a fairly good chance you could be killed by an electrical power surge. But, let's be honest, that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make sooner that I'm willing to wait the sixteen months it takes most things your shape to learn to walk from scratch."_

Somewhere behind her, the arm holding the cable angled carefully at an appropriately sized connector near the base of the android's spine, and plugged her silently into the mainframe.

One moment there had been a great deal of confusion and unawareness. The next she was aware of _everything- _from her metal finger joints to her artificial toes- as a burning bolt of pain and information shot straight up the central cord of her from the attached cable and flooded her processor until it felt like she might just shut straight back down again and that would be so much better.

No, the beginning really hadn't been all that good at all.

The part that followed hadn't been especially great either. She'd barely gotten used to stumbling around the small cluttered room when she was booted out from it, the mechanical arms picking her up and placing her outside repeatedly when she tried to clamber back into that familiar space.

She wasn't alone, though. The Voice had followed her out onto the poorly lit catwalks, where it echoed just as loudly and suddenly, and still caused Orange to startle and stagger at its cold and uncompassionate tones.

On top of that, her head hadn't yet stopped reeling from all the data she'd unwillingly downloaded. It was hard to make sense of most things, even the immediate ones like the pipes she kept tripping over, with so much else jostling to find a position in her limited hard-drive space. Most of it was functional and had given her an immediate boost in the necessary operating tools of her newly acquired body- moving the legs, gripping with the fingers, blinking her two new little eyes, not swallowing the tongue, and so on.

She'd also been wired a staggering amount of base information about the Aperture Science Testing Facilities and Mechanics, most of which she couldn't make any immediate sense of in the slightest. However, when she'd been instructed to pick up the Handheld Portal Device, she'd known it immediately on sight, as if a file had just opened itself to the correct page for her and displayed the blueprints right in front of her first eye.

Unfortunately, the data on how to actually _operate_ it properly didn't appear to have made a clean transfer, so she settled for clutching it tight against her body and carrying it around with her like a safety blanket.

Now she was running lightly, the gridded catwalk growing familiar underfoot. There were courses that branched off from the one she followed, small dark pathways that lead away into the distance or a turn in the other direction that showed a slim door at the end of a narrow walkway. When she'd shown her initial interest in these unexplored passages and first attempted to step off the trail she'd been set on, the light had cut and she'd panicked; almost tripping over the railing into the abyss in her fear.

_"And that would have been the end of you. Wouldn't that have been a waste? Of my time."_

But the path she'd come from was still barely bright, a faded warm glow that she staggered back to desperately and never dared to venture off from again.

And _then_, just as she'd grown comfortable in the dimly lit, thoroughly rusted, eerily empty spaces, her old nemesis- the robotic arms- appeared again. So she may have gotten herself stuck in some cabling, but she was still figuring out how to properly control her arms and would have gotten there in the end. Instead of being given the chance, she was hefted up by the back of her collar; swung through the air and deposited in a room so blinding bright and white it made her blink and squint.

Actually though, it had been pretty much uphill from there.

There'd been someone else; someone who had appeared suddenly behind her while she scrabbled with the wall. So that was new. And they didn't have robotic arms, which was a definite plus! _And_ they knew how to operate the ASHPD, _and_ they took the time to show her, **_and_** they had willingly listened about the Rooster for quite a lot of minutes without complaining once or even looking bored.

Now able to create portals, Orange had come to see herself for the first time, and established very quickly that the two of them had a lot of the same basic features. The other figure was quieter, taller, bluer, stiller, had-a-big-long-dark-coat-ier and was wearing a lot of excess material damage- scuffs and scrapes and tears from a lifetime of testing- that Orange lacked almost entirely despite her run in with the piston out the back. But they were the same enough, and Blue was pleasant and patient and kind, and Orange had known immediately that companionship was at least a million times preferable to being alone.

After that, she'd been taught to _test_.

She remembered that feeling when she'd first woken, that she'd had Something To Do, and perhaps this had been it after all. When the crosses changed to ticks and their first door swung open, something itched up her spine and echoed along her aching cables even though she'd long since been detached from the mainframe, and she'd jumped and giggled freely in the exuberance of it.

When the Voice had punished her she'd panicked, squashed between the two panels and with blueprints and spiked-plates spinning across her vision. Still, she would have squealed with a sort of indignation if she'd paid attention and hadn't been so frightened; _I have interest in testing_ the Voice and said, and wasn't that exactly what she was doing?

After that she dedicated herself to the task at hand. As best she could, anyway. There was just so much to see and explore when one wasn't face first on the roof of an elevator, or being abruptly flung halfway across the room by a clear, impatient floor panel that didn't want to wait for her to closely inspect the flickering sign at the entrance of the test chambers for a further ten minutes.

Fairly quickly she'd noticed her companion squinting, her higher eyes narrowed behind two clear lenses, attempting to pick out details in the distance. When Orange looked, all three of her eyes trained to one area and- with the almost inaudible sound of optical zooming- it was as clear as day. At first she'd tried to be patient, bouncing on her toes and waiting for Blue to tell her what to do, but then she realized she could _help._

Proudly she'd send her red portal into the far distance and plant the companion at her feet, dropping herself through seamlessly. Now that she knew how to fire them and had gotten over the initial shock, it all seemed very natural and fun. Within moments she'd return to present Blue proudly with cubes, sometimes round, sometimes marked with small hearts, others glassy edged for redirecting lazers.

That had gone over quite well, with Blue smiling at her, or placing the cubes onto buttons until all the crosses were yellow ticks, and once or twice positioning them both near the doorway just as it had opened so that they could enjoy the rush of cool air on their faces.

Orange hadn't thought there could be much better than that; the shiver along her spine and the glee of testing, and a companion who smiled quietly and nodded, who saved her from the snatching arms and guided her when she was lost, confused or, most inevitably, distracted.

Togetherness and testing. She was certain this was what she'd been built for.

Question-and-Answer time had taken her a bit by surprise at first. Her companion pointing to herself, and saying her name, and seeming to expect some sort of answer to it. Orange didn't know what, until she realized they were labelling everything.

At last all that data she'd been forced to download, what felt like folders and folders of blueprints and spec sheets cluttering in her memory space, had been immediately useful. She could name almost every apparatus and mechanic fluently, even things that Blue herself didn't seem to know. Despite the infuriating lack of operating information for most items, all that seemed to be required for this part of testing were the names, and Blue was nodding in approval every time Orange got something right.

"Little," Blue said finally, pointing at her, and she stared for some time.

She'd woken up in that first room without a name and only a vague sense of purpose, and it was one of the few things that the files had never provided any answers to. But now she had one; not a long complicated one worth shortening to a bunch of letters, like the ASHPD or the HDS-CSB, but a _name_. Concise and clean and obvious- like Blue, or Voice, or Portal.

"Little. That's me!" She exclaimed excitedly, jumping up and down in place, ignoring the distant sound of the Voice chastising them. The last thing Blue had said then, had been to declare them as a unit, friends.

At first, Little wasn't sure what that meant. But something had emerged out of the cloying, noisy mess inside her processors- leaping right to the front and knocking aside several species of Accipitridae in order to get her attention. It had dressed itself up as the small cube with its soft pink heart, and brought an odd feeling with it.

Hopeful and warm and uplifting, and even _better_ than the itch at the base of her metal spine.

_Friends._

It flooded all the way down to her fingertips still wrapped around the trigger of her portal device- _friends_- and a hundred different colours flashed blindingly in front of her digital eye- _friends_- tugging at things buried deep beneath birds and Aperture products. It was overwhelming, and it made her dizzy- which made her even clumsier than before- but it persisted even once they'd finished that chamber, and she barely even noticed the rush as the door opened.

Togetherness and testing. _Friends._

Yes, Little was definitely having the time of her life.


End file.
